Carol Pinchefsky contemplates commercial skipping DVRs, and other tales of really good technology that vanished, in 7 Awesome Bits of Tech That Just Freakin' Disappeared. As Pinchefsky writes: "...It got me thinking about awesome technology that we somehow ditched. The airship? Awesome. Slide rules? Awesome awesome. Mir Space Station? Boss-level awesome. And now just thinking about wristwatches with calculators makes me suffer a sense of short-term nostalgia (as in Douglas Coupland's Generation X). Here are some of the coolest features and products that we’ve lost along the way to 2012.

Perhaps it would had been more interesting if they would've had provided a generic box with just a pcie x8 slot into which you could've plugged any video card. That would've truly been awesome.

Difference there is heat, power draw and size. These where MXM card mobile GPUs and allowed for crossfire by daisy chaining them.

What you are talking about would be more like the ViDock http://www.villageinstruments.com/tiki-index.php?page=ViDock Expresscard slot adapter, could take any sub 75w PCIe card, came empty or with an HD4670. Problem with it is the fact that Expresscard is PCIe 1x bandwidth, so it doesn't take much from a modern card to fully saturate it. It looks like they now sell models that support up to 225w, but still crippled by Expresscard. It's simple to test, tape up your GPU's contacts so it can only run in 1x mode vs 8x-16x. Between 8x and 16x the difference is usually negligible, but between 1x and 8x is night and day.